Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-06-14-Speech-3-056"
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"en.20000614.4.3-056"2
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"Mr President, I welcome this timely and useful debate, which was introduced characteristically and forcefully by my honourable friend, Mr Brok, in a thoughtful and useful speech. I welcome the report by Mrs Lalumière. It is an exceptionally helpful document. What it says about non-military crisis management provides us with a checklist, an action list of things we should be making sure are put in place over the next few years. It is a very good report, and I would like to congratulate the honourable lady, without reservation, on what she has said.
This time we have to make a difference. This time we have to ensure that a common foreign and security policy ensures that Europe discharges its responsibilities at the level which events require, at the level which our citizens now in my judgement demand. We in the Commission want to play our full part in ensuring that this time a common foreign and security policy is a resounding success.
The Commission has actively contributed to non-military crisis management since long before the Cologne and Helsinki Summits. These summits have reminded us that there is an urgent need for our policies to become more ambitious, coherent and effective. We need to improve our capacity for rapid and targeted action. We need to step up our efforts of coordination. We need to improve the availability of analysis and information exchange, and we need to radically enhance our capacities for pursuing preventive policies.
The creation of additional instruments, or the mobilisation of additional funding, does not, in my judgement, stand in the centre of current deliberations; nor are far-reaching Treaty changes required. Instead, our focus lies on using existing instruments and financial resources considerably more efficiently. Parliament knows the priority which the Commission and I attach to discharging our existing competencies a great deal more energetically and a great deal more competently than we have in the past. That gives us a considerable agenda for the next few years. I hope that we will have the support of Parliament in working through it.
We should build on existing competencies. We should bring them to bear more effectively on the twin goals of conflict prevention and crisis management. Saying ‘no’ to institutional revolution does not mean turning our backs on innovation.
The Commission recently tabled a proposal for the creation of a rapid reaction facility. The limited funds we think are required for that facility will be found by redeployment within our existing budget.
I also believe that the idea to set up a European civil police corps merits careful examination through a feasibility study by the Council, as proposed in the relevant European Parliament resolution. It is also plain that the Commission's lack of human resources for both conflict prevention and crisis management greatly impinges upon our capacity to make more rapid progress in this field, though that is something we are attempting at present to address.
Let me be clear about the Commission's role. We are plainly not responsible for coordination of the military and civil components in crisis management. What the Commission is trying to do is to ensure an effective and coherent Community input into the overall coordinated effort of the Union in this area.
I have spoken before about the impossibility of making a clear distinction, in preventing a crisis or in managing a crisis, between the military and the civil components. The important thing is to recognise the relationship between the two. Look at what the Commission is doing around the world: we are paying for the training of police in anti-terrorism tasks in Palestine. We are helping to create border services in the Balkans. We are spending money on de-mining in virtually every continent. Those are the sorts of ways in which the Commission is contributing to preventative diplomacy and I hope that in future Europe will manage those tasks in a more coherent way.
This is not our first effort to create as it were a common foreign and security policy. We had the Pleven plan. We had de Gasperi. We had Fouchet. We had years of European political cooperation, during which there were lots of ringing declarations, perhaps slightly too many of them, some weeks after they could actually have any effect on events. The decision taken at Maastricht, the decision taken at Amsterdam, the decision taken at Helsinki – they all mark a signal move forward, a recognition that we have not done enough in the past to ensure that Europe's voice is heard adequately around the world and that Europe's capacities to prevent and manage crises are brought to bear with sufficient competence and vigour."@en1
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